Test automation itself is a software engineering project and its effectiveness, efficiency, and maintainability quite often present the same engineering challenges as other software projects. The development community has been embracing the “design pattern” concepts for 15 years, in effort of addressing software engineering difficulties and formalizing design and coding process. Design pattern practice is not widely used in the software test automation community. Ill-planned, and roughly designed test automation projects are still widespread. This paper tries to define a “test case automatic generation” design pattern, which addresses the most common and fundamental test automation engineering issues facing most testers today. The concepts presented in this paper have been implemented by the author and his team when testing several Microsoft products.
This paper illustrates how to apply design pattern to test automation design. The pattern is test case generation using micro-action, meta-data and actual data generator, and test state manager. Using this design pattern provides set a good platform for creating random test cases according to the product specification, improving test coverage, and test automation effectiveness.
Lian Yang joined Image Builder Software as a software engineer after graduating from Portland State University in 1991. He worked on software for children including the popular such as KidPix and TreeHouse. He joined Microsoft 1n 1995 and worked at Microsoft Internal Tools for testing and performance tools. There he became interested in software quality issues such as test automation and testability. He became an SDET and joined Smartphone team, where he invented two test automation tools that are critical to wireless application testing. Both inventions were submitted for patents; one has been approved already. Later Lian joined the Windows Security team where he was responsible for distributed test environment building. He joined the Windows Storage Server team as an SDET lead in 2007.
WordPress website created by Mozak Design - Portland, OR
Copyright PNSQC 2020